My alarm went off in my gym locker-scented dorm room at Taft College, meaning that I needed to hurry to my 7:45 class. After all, it was my baseball coach who was my professor - can't be late to his class. The night before was a ton of fun in the dorms. We had returned from a fall baseball trip in the evening and the 4 hour bus ride had gotten to us, so we started a food fight. FOOD. WAS. EVERYWHERE. Knowing that we would be running for HOURS if coach found out, we cleaned up the oranges and spare parts of sandwiches, but the memory was still fresh in my mind. I walked out of my room and headed off to class, stepping over some orange splatter and a sandwich wrapper that must've been overlooked by our cleaning efforts. Oh well, I thought, I'll get it after class. Before I got out of the gate, Manny Rodriguez, the sophomore who we all loved and who was always laughing, yelled out "Hey Stevens, we're going to war!"

"C'mon man, we can't. Coach is already going to be pissed when he finds out about this. Last night was fun, but we gotta stop. I gotta get to class."

"No, get in here. We're going to war."

As soon as I got into his room, I saw the second plane hit the tower. Our lives haven't been the same ever since.

During my first year in the classroom, I asked students about 9/11 and they were dumbfounded. "Why would this matter to me", they thought, and I was taken aback. "What do you mean, why would this matter to me?! This is a part of our history! We all know where we were on that day, at that time, and... wait. You were only 8. Hold up - we need to talk."

DISCLAIMER: This is from my second year of teaching. There are faults. This is before I was blessed with the know-how to let students run wild with technology. This was before the fads and edutrends of edtech started, at least for me. This is before the iPad existed. This was what I knew to be the best way to teach.

The opening story above was my opening hook to my students on September 11th of 2007, my second year of teaching. The students knew something was up when I started class by talking. Usually it was a video, a picture, or a problem. Today, it was a story. I needed them to feel even the slightest bit of emotion that I did, and still do, even 14 years later. They were floored, the quietest the room had been all two weeks of the school year and probably the rest of the year as well. It was working so far.

Next, I handed the students a sheet of paper and told them to go find the answers:

At first, it may seem like I was trying to weasel some math into a history lesson. Or was it some history into a math lesson? Or was it a way to serve a conversation? Who knows. It was working.

After that, we watched some videos of the 9/11 media coverage:

Students worked in pairs to research and answer each of the questions from the handout, knowing a little bit more and feeling a little bit more emotion. By coincidence, the number of people who died was very comparable to the enrollment of the neighboring high school that most of the students would attend next year and many of them had friends and/or family currently attending. Because the students had no memory, no context, of what happened on September 11th, 2001, I had to create it.

"Imagine if one day, everyone at Cathedral City High School was gone. GONE. That's what those families still live with to this day."

Silence. It was working.

I knew some kids would get teary-eyed. I did. Still do. What I wasn't prepared for was Jose, the tough guy in the class who still hadn't figured out how much "I'm a bad ass" he needed to portray in the class that was merely 2 weeks old in the new school year. Jose kept pinching his fresh white Stafford t-shirt to his eyes, looking up in between pinches to reveal ever-reddening eyes, but not wanting to miss another picture, another moment. Something struck him like I never thought it would.

After the videos and the pictures, questions came pouring in, each one showing signs of emotion and desire to learn more, to feel more. They asked if they could look up more videos and I agreed, as long as they knew that there are ton of conspiracy theories that are completely unsubstantiated. Yes. Do it. It was working.

Two nights before this lesson, as it so often happens in my scattered brain, I was trying to fall asleep and a thousand ideas, thoughts, and memories flooded my path to REM status. One of them woke me up to the point of writing down an idea: "Talk to Lowe's giant scale model Twin Towers" was the note to remind me.

The next morning on my prep, I called the local Lowe's to talk to a manager. After explaining my idea to him, Rodrigo was more than happy to help. "Sure", he replied, "We can take care of you!" Wait, it was working?

After school, I went to Lowe's to pick up enough plywood, 2x4's, screws, wood glue, and electrical tape to create a 1:100 scale model of both Tower 1 and Tower 2. The students were tasked with asking their parents to give them aluminum foil. Our goal was to recreate the Twin Towers in a 1:100 ratio and we did. Over the course of 2 weeks following September 11th, 2007, we worked together to build those towers. The only work that I did was the work I was legally required (or was afraid of handing over to the kids) to do: cut and drill. They measured every cut. They held every piece. They carried and organized the entire event. They checked for accuracy. They split electrical tape in half and wrapped it around the towers to represent every floor of Tower 1 and Tower 2. They came in for hours each day after school to build two towers. IT. WORKED.

At the end of the project, we stood back and admired the work that we had done. A group of about 20 8th graders who were spending their second, third, and fourth weeks in school, were engaging in something that I hope that they'll never forget. To cap it all off, I tried really hard to get the local museum to take the towers and display them as a tribute. Unfortunately, for reasons unknown, they "didn't have room at the time", so we displayed them in the school multi-purpose room for a few weeks.

One of the qualities of a teacher is that, I believe by nature, we are a humble people. We don't seek praise or external affirmation - we get it from our students and our peers when we crave it. However, seeing the work that these kids did made me realize that it would be selfish to let it die there; the general public needed to see this. Being the careless second year teacher that I was, I called the district's PR contact person and told her about the project as it was winding down. She sent out a local newspaper to interview us, but the kids were really stoked to see the news channel come by with cameras and a reporter. IT. WORKED.

DISCLAIMER 2: They say some nice things about me. That's not why I'm sharing the video. At the same time, I'm proud of it. We worked hard and it felt damn good to hear those things come from a reporter. Wouldn't it be nice if more teachers were put in the media spotlight? I agree.

That was the first and last year of that project for reasons I still don't quite understand. It was a ton of effort. It was a ton of work. It was the best lesson I ever taught. We did similar projects every year after, but none as large in scale or time commitment as the group of students from 2007. I wanted them to walk away with compassion for those who died and an idea of the void that the vacancy of those towers have left on us. I have to believe that it worked.

Holy tear jerker! Love all of it! The compassion, the empathy, the math, the history. Well done! It does feel good to have someone acknowledge your work every now and then. It happens next to never in our profession. This was really great work in so many ways! We were talking about 9/11 in PLC yesterday. Our students weren't even born yet! How much do you tell first graders? Thanks for sharing!